I have finally drawn something that doesn't make me sad... Yay! It is a development of one of the sketches from my previous post. I have had the main idea for this guy for a while but never did anything about it. I want to do some mini comics/short stories to build up a world and this may be the first.

Tuesday, 12 June 2012

I'm terrible at this internet presence thing... sorry... I guess. I don't want to say I will be better from now on because I know realistically I could fail at that so I am just gonna say I want to be better.

I recently had my final assessment of my Illustration degree (yay!) it was fairly disheartening (booo!) but I am recovering I think. The assessors had a few thing to say about things I made mistakes on, namely the printing of the comic, and one thing I have been trying to get a solution to for at least 3 years, my artwork which I am finally proud of. Getting negative feedback was hard to accept because I put my full time and effort into creating something that I feel is a huge improvement for me, I knew it wasn't perfect and I can still improve but I had come leaps and bounds from the first day of this project let alone the year or the course. I won't let this beat me though, I know I have a long road ahead, I know this is the first round of harsh criticism that I have to face at a time when I think I am succeeding. So I will do better next time and I will keep doing it my way just like I did this last uni project.

Due to the shock of this, I make it sound awful but it really was just me thinking I was doing so well and being told I was still nowhere near, I have been a bit shaky creatively for the past week. I avoided picking up a pencil for a good couple of days and when I did finally I felt like crap. Here's what I did:

That was meant to be the lizard from Spider-Man. It isn't horrible but I just felt crappy while doing it. After that I had a mental war with a piece of paper writing down what I wanted to do next. I always have new ideas popping up and I never use them so I tried to cement some of them down. It felt like I was trying too hard and I don't ever feel comfortable trying to create. The way I like to create is by doing it and letting the idea and the picture come together not forcing anything out.

My next war was with a blank page and a pencil trying to draw and it was helping me feel more comfortable but I still had no confidence in what I was drawing. I did a doodle or two of the characters I had just finished drawing in my project and I realised that although I still loved those characters I had no intention on running back to them, I don't know why maybe I am burned out or maybe I just need a break but I want to do something else. I talked all this through with my girlfriend, who puts up with my f***ed up head all the time, and then I slept on it.

I woke up today and started fresh I got a clean sheet of paper and just drew some stuff, Ideas for stories, characters, places and whatever else came out. I wanted to get back to what I love about comics, the storytelling. Here's a few of the things I did:

Some of this has stories some doesn't but everything has a place in my head which is how I like it to be. I hope I can show you some development of these things sooner rather than later so watch this space. Thanks for reading hope you like the doodles.